To-day I have
nothing,--except the shame with which you and Oswald say that I have
covered myself."
"Laura, I have never said so."
"I saw it in your eye when he accused me. And I know that it is
shameful. I do know that I am covered with shame. But I can bear my
own disgrace better than his danger." After a long pause,--a silence
of probably some fifteen minutes,--she spoke again. "If Robert should
die,--what would happen then?"
"It would be--a release, I suppose," said Lady Chiltern in a voice so
low, that it was almost a whisper.
"A release indeed;--and I would become that man's wife the next day,
at the foot of the gallows;--if he would have me. But he would not
have me."
CHAPTER LII
Mr. Kennedy's Will
Mr. Kennedy had fired a pistol at Phineas Finn in Macpherson's Hotel
with the manifest intention of blowing out the brains of his presumed
enemy, and no public notice had been taken of the occurrence. Phineas
himself had been only too willing to pass the thing by as a trifling
accident, if he might be allowed to do so, and the Macphersons had
been by far too true to their great friend to think of giving him in
charge to the police.
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